Gartner and
other IT pundits have continually pushed the concept that the app is king. In
many respects, it is. Application developers remain one of the "hottest IT
jobs," according to the trade press, though more of these jobs are being
outsourced than ever before and online job boards are full of less glamorous
titles such as "IT operations manager" and "network architect." Apps make money
and they propel startups to IPOs. Apps get people to buy $600 tablets. But they
aren't always the best focus for the people who are responsible for keeping the
lights on in IT. Without the infrastructure optimized, even the greatest apps
don't deliver their value because they aren't performing efficiently.

For years,
the IT service and the apps beneath it have dominated discussions around
management and performance. App performance management (APM) has emerged to
dominate the IT landscape, and large IT vendors have continued to push their pricey,
legacy APM suites. Yet the app, albeit center stage from the business
perspective, is not where IT needs to focus today: it's the infrastructure
events that run beneath and all around those apps. Understanding the connection
between the various components and technologies is critical in managing IT
operations today.

Monolithic
applications are taking the back seat to applications running in highly
distributed, cloud or hybrid cloud environments. The modern, "transient" app consists
of virtual components that appear and disappear with little notice; people are
also using different methods to access them, such as tablets or smartphones.

This
constantly shifting environment is driving many IT organizations to dig a
little deeper to see critical performance trends. Today, managing applications and
service levels means managing all of the events across every part of the
infrastructure, in real time.

First, you
ask, what's an event? An event is any alteration in the infrastructure, whether
that's a traffic spike or a server going offline or a database configuration
change. Events, unlike incidents, are not necessarily negative. Yet with the
thousands of events occurring every day across a company's infrastructure, it's
impossible to manually track and prioritize these events without some sort of
automation. That's where some of the newer, SaaS tools for modern operations
management come into play. This sector of software has been growing quickly and
attracted higher than ever volumes of funding in the past year, with startups
such as AppDynamics and Splunk making a splash with investors.

Why look at events?

But let's get back to the central
question: why should IT and the business give a hoot about the arcane
infrastructure event?

Think about
the number of applications companies are managing today versus 10 years ago:
it's likely more than twice the number, plus all the data coming from both
virtual and physical machines, mobile devices and even multiple hosting
providers. With the cloud, event management has become all the more complex. If
you want to understand how your IT environment is performing at any given time
(especially the revenue-generating components such as your public website and
customer facing apps), you've got to first get a handle on these events.

Companies
can't afford downtime on their sites, nor poor customer service from an agent
that can't open the CRM application while a customer hangs on the line, nor a
mobile app that continually goes offline, causing service technicians to be in
the dark about their daily schedule. Those capabilities are table stakes;
without reliable IT, there's no room for any innovation much less mind-blowing
market disruptions.

Now as for
the CIO, he or she has got to pay attention to events and the practice of event
management, because if they don't know how to properly manage this new virtual,
hybrid cloud environment, they're out of a job. Users are much more in tune
today; they begin to complain the instant an app or site is down. They will
certainly start tweeting about it, if the CIO doesn't catch it and fix it
pronto. Here's the other scary thing for CIOs: if they can't fix response time
and application issues in due order, newly IT savvy business managers will run
out and provision servers somewhere else with a new app, thank you very much.

This transition from an app perspective
to an event perspective is not a big deal for IT workers in the trenches. In
fact, it makes a heck of a lot more sense to them. IT organizations have long
struggled with understanding all the applications the company is using.
Focusing on events is in some ways easier and also provides a better analytic, allowing
a more detailed view of what's going on across multiple servers and tiers.

By focusing
on event management, IT obtains a high-level picture of your entire environment
to effectively manage risk. They can also drill down when they need to diagnose
an issue. Organizations that do not adequately understand, monitor and manage
events, run the risk of alienating customers and the business alike, with
poorly-performing, unreliable systems. Putting an eagle's eye on IT events is
less about preventing disasters, than it is about keeping users and end
customers happy. Can you afford not to change your IT Ops viewpoint?